


On the Bank on the River

by gomollusk



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Cam Jam, Discord: The People's Tomb (Locked Tomb Trilogy), F/M, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:48:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26776138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gomollusk/pseuds/gomollusk
Summary: There is nothing here, and that nothing never changes. Until it does.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	On the Bank on the River

It was best, he’d learned, when he did not scream. This wasn’t something he did often corporeally, but even so he knew that when a living being screamed, the act was defined by its constraints. The throat stung, the vocal chords battered and fried, and consequently it was over not long after it began. Not so now. As a revenant, Palamedes Sextus could scream forever and watch the borders that kept him insulated reverberate. Without his bubble and without his resolve, he would be as every other revenant, part of the shrieking miasma that made the river. And knowing this, he clutched his right hand as tightly as he could bear and stopped himself. He breathed for the ritual of it, rubbed his thumb into his palm, and then, when the feelings resolved themselves, he wrote another chapter.

  
The steady slow-burn effort of course-correcting Abella Trine’s disastrous choices in _The Necromancer’s Marriage Season_ had taken the better part of the eastern wall. But now, in the climax of volume three, she was finally ready to confess her feelings to the swordswoman after nearly catching her death of hypothermia wandering listlessly through the moors of Tisis. Even now he remained the greatest necromancer of his generation but, should his resurrection never come to pass and his earth-shattering revelations never be revealed at the 5th House’s Sprit Magic Symposium, he could almost see himself making a career as a novelist. A small mercy that no one could see him now, on his stomach and occasionally twisting a little as he etched in that last bit of space between the wallpaper and the molding.

  
“You mustn’t speak now,” the swordswoman murmured huskily as she carried Abella up the hill to Wentworth Manor. “Just let me look at you,” Abella breathed in answer. Her skirts were drenched with rain and she shivered as their eyes met. How she had longed to see them once more; dark brown with flecks of grey, so focused and sure. She too was undone by the gaze, and now stopped in her tracks, the rain pouring on. “Grant me the privilege of truth from you, Lady Abella, if you have ever considered me worthy of such a thing,” her voice quavered and her arms, so strong in martial prowess, couldn’t help but shake as her face, usually as stolid and passive as marble, collapsed. “Was it because of all my sexy parties?” she sobbed.

  
Abella, overcome, grabbed her savior by the cravat, and with all the strength she could muster, pulled the swordswoman Drusilla Bast into a kiss, which was all the swordswoman could stand before collapsing with Abella in her arms onto the rain-slick moors. Abella leaned over her savior, now her captive, tears indistinguishable from the rain that engulfed them.  
“No, Drusilla, no. It was never the sexy parties!” she screamed as thunder cracked above them, “I have lived my entire life in dogged pursuit of a dream! A story I’d been telling myself over and over since I was a child about my future together with one person! I have blinded myself to everything besides. Now I live in the ruins of a home that’s not my own, among the vestments and liveries of a man who was never even the man I spent my life loving, the man in the letters. He too, was a story. I have wasted my life! A life in which you were always right beside me, my one constant, my closest friend, my knight, my ca

  
His pencil chipped against the molding. Tears had been running down his cheekbones and onto the floorboards. He rolled onto his back and blinked. This was gold. In the Sextennial Post Book Review they would call it a heartbreaking work of extraordinary genius. A true successor. It would also be the first novel to have the uncanny distinction of being written on the bank of the river. He laughed, as he often did, to himself. Would the author of the source material be in here too? Would she choke him to double-death for this turgid prose? A welcome proposition, at this point, and a fine thing to imagine to avoid his other revenant activities such as

  
• Looking too hard and too long at the bed where the lyctor that piloted Dulcinea once lay.  
• Talking to himself at length which always ended in a row.  
• More screaming.  
• More crying.  
• Finishing this chapter which, upon reflection, was terrible.

  
Or worst of all: allowing his mind to speculate. With a perfect memory it had been an easier kind of torture to re-live the events proceeding his death. At least then it was almost like a piece of entertainment. He wasn’t a fan of the season finale, but he had to admit, up until that point, there was a lot of intrigue. The regrets, at first, were all-encompassing enough that he had practically drafted revisions of the events at Canaan House with the same kind of ferocity he drafted his period romance turned bodice-ripper. But none of that mattered anymore. Now that the Reverend Daughter, his only visitor, had brought informed him that Camilla was alive and all had gone according to plan, the ensuing relief had buckled under the enormity of what he didn't know. Where was she? Why had it it taken her eight months to find the lyctor of the ninth house? How was Gideon still in there? So vibrant and so incredibly angry. 

  
But Nonagesimus had given him a gift and now he was hesitating. All these distractions were just more acts of cowardice. He was afraid to stretch beyond the bounds of what he knew he could control. But it was time. He crawled up from the floor, wiping the last bits of tears and snot (Why? How? He could cry but he couldn’t sleep or shit? Preposterous!) and sat in the well-worn Canaan House desk chair. He looked out at the static ocean, the waves juddering ever so subtly. And he breathed. For the feeling of it, for the routine, and to map out where he was and who he was before he stretched beyond those bounds. A long, thin tether. He could never watch tightrope walkers. How his form remembered the feelings of fear; the palpitations of the heart, the beads of sweat, as he allowed the bubble to grow translucent around him. Palamedes Sextus gazed into the river and

  
***

Camilla Hect was in her bunk below two more in a room of twelve and as such she did everything in her power not to scream when a hand moved that was not her own. The construct Nonagesimus had crafted just a month prior twitched. In the quiet moments between missions she had kept it with her out of habit, waiting for the moment. Without thinking, without knowing if it would transmit, purely out of instinct she moved it from her pillow and interlocked her fingers in the fingers crafted from fragments of skull. Not saying a word, not moving, not daring to wake the others out of fear that she might have to explain the unexplainable to the Edenites, she lay in silence and clutched Palamedes hand tightly in the dark.

  
But nothing happened. This had been another semi-conscious mirage, a waking dream. Perhaps Nonagesimus, stripped of memory and all but the barest graces, had just lied. Or perhaps, soon after her arrival Palamedes had faded, now just another soul among souls, lost forever. It would have been nothing short of a miracle for him to hold on this long anyway. How absurd, how stupid, to hope that even a necromancer like him could wait eight months for her at the edge of forever. She gritted her teeth, trying not to do what she had done too often and too loudly when she thought of him, each time her body attempted to mourn felt like surrender. Constantly holding it back. Not yet. Not yet. She was about to give in when slowly, carefully, and tightly, around her bruised and calloused hand, Palamedes' fingers curled.


End file.
